Editor's note: As 2016 draws to a close, we asked our reporters to reflect on some of the most interesting stories they covered this year.

"Are you a cop?"

Clearly, I was not.

I turned to leave, but a Dallas police officer tapped my shoulder.

"She's from Dallas, she's with us," he told the door guy. He let me in.

I stepped into the tan-carpeted ballroom at the Marriott in Baton Rouge. Cops from all over -- rural Louisiana and Fort Worth, New York City and Minnesota -- stood clutching beers and whiskeys. They wore Navy or black police T-shirts, a sort of off-duty uniform.

They'd come to Louisiana's capital city that humid night, July 22, for funerals. A few days earlier, a gunman had baited, then hunted, three officers there. The shooter had been inspired by another man's rampage in Dallas that month that killed five officers.

Both gunmen claimed they were avenging the deaths of black people at the hands of police.

Like more death could somehow help America.

One of the deaths that had roiled the country was Alton Sterling's. In his final moments on July 5, filmed by bystanders, he writhed on the ground under the grip of two white Baton Rouge policemen. Police later said Sterling had a pistol in his front pocket. "He's going for the gun!" one officer had shouted, just prior to firing.

A screenshot of video showing Alton Sterling being fatally shot by Baton Rouge police in July.

(YouTube)

And now eight officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge were dead, and one more lay in a hospital with bullet fragments in his brain.

That night at the Marriott, the weight of those trying times was visible on the cops' faces. But laughter still roared through the room.

After about a half hour, a burly bald man with a handlebar mustache approached me and introduced himself as Mike Bartis, a Dallas motorcycle cop.

"I'm sorry to tell you this, but you're making some of the people here uncomfortable," he told me. "Nothing personal, but we just don't want any reporters around right now."

"That's fine," I told him. "Look, I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable. I'll get out of here."

But first he wanted to tell me, very politely, why I wasn't welcome -- that the news media have been unfair to police since Ferguson. That we've been too quick to lionize people killed by officers. That we've painted all officers as racists.

It's one thing to report on a shooting, he told me. But every time there is one, y'all bring up all the other ones, even if they were justified, and make it seem like police are on a killing spree. Why, he asked, don't you cover doctors this way? Medical errors kill far more people every year than police do, he pointed out.

In the Uber back to my hotel, I felt hopeless. I broke down in tears. The officers were such good people, but so misunderstood. So, too, were many people in minority communities who felt the cops treated them all like criminals.

I remembered talking to the Williams family, just miles from the hotel that night, back when I was a reporter in Baton Rouge in 2012. Linda and Darrell Williams, a hard-working black couple in their late 40s, had told me they watched in horror through their front window as a group of cops rough-handled their two sons on their front lawn, and found one had a small amount of marijuana. The parents had recalled being treated disrespectfully by the officers, who threatened to arrest them if they came outside.

Then I thought about the barrage of social media posts I'd had to read recently in Dallas when we were trying to figure out what had motivated both shooters. People they'd followed, or people who followed them, had urged others to "kill the pigs," and "show them how it feels." Post after post after post. There were, of course, plenty of people who wanted police reform and had vast respect for officers -- but I suddenly realized that the segment of the population who wanted to attack them was larger than I'd thought.

The next day, Mike texted me apologizing if he hurt my feelings and asking me to grab lunch back in Dallas. There's no need to apologize, I told him, but lunch sounds fine. A few weeks later, we met at the Rustic in Uptown. Over sandwiches and iced tea, he said sorry again, for kicking me out. Again, I told him I understood. We ended up discussing how both our jobs work, and why we do things the way we do.

Dallas police Officer Mike Bartis was photographed with Travis Mills, a quad-amputee who lost all his limbs in a bombing in Afghanistan, after providing a security detail for Mills in 2013. (Provided by Mike Bartis)

Mike retired from the DPD in October after 33 years. Now, he says, the news doesn't bother him as much because it no longer feels personal. He also doesn't follow the latest police news closely anymore.

He recalled "hundreds" of black and Hispanic people he'd stopped over the years who'd thanked him for keeping their neighborhoods safe, for catching bad guys.

"I know they appreciate us," Mike said recently. "But you just don't see that in the news."

So how does America move forward?

"I guess it's just that age-old thing, to try and love everybody despite their faults, even when they screw up," he said. "Sometimes there's evil out there that has to be dealt with, and it's unfortunate. We don't go looking for it, but a cop will handle it when it needs to be handled. We just need to love each other. If we all do it, maybe things will change. I think they will. I don't think it's nearly as bad as you would think if you were to open the news every day."

That makes sense to me. We do need to love each other -- and listen to each other. We need to turn down the anger and acknowledge the other side makes some good points, that they have good reason to feel the way they do. These are conversations that are nuanced and complex, and can't be simplified into hashtags or three words -- not Black Lives Matter, nor All Lives Matter.

I've been privileged as a reporter to be invited into the living rooms of black families who have felt victimized by the police, and share meals with police who have felt unfairly maligned. There are ways non-journalists could try to have these conversations too.

I'm a white journalist. I'm no cop, no black community member. But I've listened to a whole bunch of them. And that's pretty much the best we can do.